Research Stories

A programme developed by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre can detect entries that have been deleted by government censors on China's Sina Weibo microblog site.

The word 'tomato' may seem innocuous enough, but in March last year it began to proliferate on China's microblog service, Sina Weibo. The Chinese translation of the word contains two characters – for red and west – which had suddenly come to symbolise disgraced former Chongqing party leader Bo Xilai, who led a 'red' revival in his base in the west of the country. Microblog postings bearing this word were quickly deleted by Chinese censors. But not completely erased.

Dr Fu King-wa, Assistant Professor in the Journalism and Media Studies Centre (JMSC), had developed a programme that can detect deleted posts and track topics of discussion. He was able to show how the word came to life and then disappeared in China's microblog universe.

"What is happening in social media in China is unprecedented, it’s very amazing," he says. "There are a lot of dynamic and robust discussions happening on different, usually very hot social topics. Sometimes you can find these discussions on online forums but not to this scale of the microblog because people can circulate their posts to more than one million others in a short period of time."

"It's a cat and mouse game – people are trying to find the bottom line for freedom of speech that the government can tolerate for the moment."

Dr Fu King-wa

The full version of this article was originally published in Bulletin. Please click here to view this HKU publication.